Free Google Message Security for primary and secondary schools with Google Apps Education Edition

Since we launched Google Apps in 2006, thousands of schools, businesses and organisations globally have adopted Google's cloud-based communication and collaboration tools - helping them increase productivity and effectiveness, reduce cost, and increase security. In fact, we announced today that more than four million students worldwide are using Google Apps in their classrooms.

Here in Australia and New Zealand, educators are embracing cloud computing, helping them achieve a wide range of learning outcomes and, most importantly, making learning fun.

Earlier this year, the New South Wales Department of Education followed the lead of the University of Waikato, the University of Auckland, and Macquarie University when they successfully migrated 1.2 million students to Google Apps. At the completion of the project, Stephen Wilson (the Chief Information Officer at the NSW DET) said: "Gmail has been working flawlessly, particularly considering that we could roll it out in a few months. It’s going fantastically and without a hitch”. Soon after, the the University of Adelaide migrated 16,000 students to Google Apps at no cost to the University.

Google Apps has proved popular at smaller schools across Australia and New Zealand too. "With Google Apps we've been able to offer communication and collaboration resources to our students and teachers which rival that of any school in the world ... all without having to worry about servers, maintenance and other overheads," says Michael Merrylees, Principal at Christ the King Anglican College in Cobram, Victoria. "Our students and teachers use Google Apps every day; like any good communication and collaboration system it simply disappears into the background, working without a hitch day after day."

As a company that's committed to constant innovation, we'd like to make it even easier for primary and secondary (K12) schools to use our tools. Today we're announcing that Google Message Security will be offered free to current and new eligible K12 Google Apps customers that opt-in to Google Message Security – powered by Postini – by July 2010. Google Message Security lets administrators limit messages based on who they're from, who they're going to, or the content they contain. Message rules can be applied to groups of users, making it easy to customise the scheme for different groups (for instance younger students, older students, and teachers).

And to further support primary and secondary education, we're launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share and learn more about Google Apps, as well as the Google Apps Education resource centre with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans. We're committed to providing even more educational resources in the future - watch this space!

Posted by Andrew Mitchell, Google Apps Team